“There’s a whorish desperation to even the very few halfway-decent writers today. You either write about the same tripe everybody else writes about—Game of Thrones, Hillary Clinton, Silicon Valley, whatever new subculture is offended by its lack of persecution, a sports star, a wealthy rapper, the Tea Party, the new iPhone—or you make a stunt […]
Continue reading →Here is a response from Karl Steel. Please take a moment and read it. I am only asking to be judged for what I actually believe and what I’ve actually said, and I have never said, suggested, or implied that race and gender are not wholly unique sites of oppression, or that solving those oppressions […]
Continue reading →Timothy B. Lee, going after Jill Lepore’s wonderful takedown of the cult of disruptive innovation: One of the big problems with the theory of disruptive innovation is that its originator, Clay Christensen, faced a conflict of interest that we might call the “Innovator’s Dilemma” Dilemma. In the introduction to his 1997 book, Christensen wrote that “colleagues […]
Continue reading →1. Statistical error is inevitable and necessary. Error, in its generic usage, pretty much always means that something has gone wrong. But statistical error refers instead to the natural variation in a distribution and the consequences of that variation. If I take a sample of some quantifiable variable, like height, and I find an average or […]
Continue reading →Here’s some things I said in my post yesterday: “Class is real and important but it’s not the same as gender and race and those are important to.” To which I would say… well, yeah! Is there a stereotype of socialists who say “it’s not about race” or similar nonsense? Sure. Such people are stupid […]
Continue reading →Peter Frase is ordinarily a writer of great clarity, which makes his latest piece for Jacobin even harder to understand. It’s a meandering, directionless complaint that seems to me to be addressing a strawman left. For all its digressions and myriad targets, it can be boiled down to saying, “Class is real and important but it’s not […]
Continue reading →Last night, I appeared on Interchange with Doug Storm on WFHB in Bloomington. I chatted about my dissertation research, why I am guardedly optimistic about the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the crisis narrative in education, and the Gates Foundation’s role in Common Core. You can check it out here.
Continue reading →As Libby Nelson wrote, it seems like everybody and their brother, including your cousin Freddie, wrote about the Brookings Institution paper on student loan debts today. It’s an emotional conversation. Given the limitations of our information, it’s also a frustrating conversation. But it’s a profoundly necessary type of conversation, and one that we’re going to […]
Continue reading →It’s just research like all research: conducted by humans, with limitations and caveats, but also deserving of a respectful, accurate reading. There’s way too much student loan debt in this country. (I hold some of it myself.) I’ve written about it at length, and many times, over the course of years. I’ve written about ways […]
Continue reading →One of the things that I have valued most about my graduate education has been the level of attention my programs and instructors have brought to my own teaching. At both my MA institution and at the doctoral level, I’ve been part of programs and departments that take graduate teaching of undergraduates very seriously, and […]
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